Former criminal and sheriff Joe Arpaio made headlines back in January 2018 when he announced that he would be running to replace retiring senator Jeff Flake’s position in Arizona. Having been pardoned of his racial-profiling charges by President Trump, there was nothing legally stopping this political bid.

Months later, the media finally has an idea of what to expect from his candidacy should he successfully be elected: a resurgence in Birtherism. In a new report from Right Wing Watch, Arpaio made it clear that he will renew his old tactic of attempting to prove that former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a fake, which has been solidly debunked over and over. But, of course, it appeals to racists who just can’t handle the idea of a black president, and want to delegitimize the Obama legacy in any way possible.

Birtherism, for readers too young to remember the early Obama years, is a disgusting political movement championed by many right-wingers, including Arpaio, Trump, and conspiracy nutcase Orly Taitz, that alleged that Obama was not born in the United States. Not only was it outright racist, but it was nonsense that even the 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain dismissed. There was also the fact that, even if it was proven that Obama had been born outside the United States, instead of in Hawaii where he was definitely born, Obama would still be a natural-born American citizen as a result of his mother’s citizenship. Just like McCain, who was born in Panama, is.

Not that facts and logic matter much to racists, whose whole belief system is predicated on rejecting the fact that human beings are equal regardless of their ethnicity, and that hate is not logical. For them, it’s all about addressing their own deep seated inferiority complexes (often taught from childhood) by declaring whatever ethnic group they happen to be part of superior. And you see the same phenomena within subsets of nearly any group, genders, professions, religions, etc. It is the wellspring of so much evil in the world, and studies show that it mirrors an effect seen in paranoid schizophrenics.

Considering Arpaio is bringing it back up, it suggests three things: one, he is delusional and obsessed with his previous failures; two, he thinks it will help him get elected by bringing out the old bigoted Republican white voters, or three, all of the above.